✨Where AI Belongs—and Doesn’t—in Your Child’s Education (Part 1)

A neuroscientist and AI insider reveal what no one else is telling parents

I didn’t want to write this.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, is talking about AI. —

They talk about how AI is going to improve education - it will - and how it’s going to harm children’s thinking - it’ll do that too.

I didn’t want to add to the noise.

But then I saw that Alpha school was offering $65,000 a year program where an AI bot teaches your kids everything they need to know in 2 hours a day… and well, I lost it.

Here’s the thing: AI is powerful, but it’s also deeply limited. And if you use it the wrong way—like outsourcing your child’s entire education to a bot—it won’t just fail. It will harm your kids.

(PS. Alpha School isn’t only using AI - their program is more complex than that)

But what frustrates me most is that NO ONE is having the messy-middle conversation.

Everyone is either pushing AI as the savior of education or avoiding it like the plague. But the truth is more complicated.

AI will be great for some things, dangerous for others, and useless for much of what actually matters in becoming truly educated.

And I know this because I happen to be an expert in two critical topics:

• How the Brain Learns

• How AI Actually Works

Many of you know that I spent 2 decades as a practicing neuroscientist. I had millions in federal funding, reviewed for NIH, was a journal editor - among other accolades.

But what you might not know is that my husband works in AI. He’s been working in AI since before it was called that. He knows the details of what it can and more importantly what it can NOT do.

So while the world argues AI is either the solution or the problem, let’s ask the only question that really matters👇

🌸Where Does AI Belong—and Where Doesn’t It—in Your Child’s Education?

Moreover, how should we approach introducing our children to AI in a way that honors how their brain works while also ensuring that they aren’t left behind?

I’m not going to wax poetically about the glory or evil of AI.

This article lives in the messy middle—because that’s real.

This article ended up being quite long (and intense), so I split it into two posts.

Over the course of two weeks, we’ll cover👇

1. How AI Actually Works (Part 1)

2. What AI can do in education (Part 1)

3. What AI can’t—and should never—do (Part 2)

4. A Guide on how to introduce AI to your kids responsibly (Part 2)

Ready? Let’s go.

✨How AI Actually Works

Before we dive into what AI can and cannot do for your child’s education, you need to know how it actually works.

From the outside, AI looks like it’s thinking—but it’s not.

The creators of AI fed it human created content books, manuscripts, websites, etc. From those billions of words, AI learned to predict what usually comes next. That’s why different AIs, trained on different data, can feel like they have “personalities.” But at its core, AI is just summarizing and remixing other human’s ideas - lots of humans - but humans none the less. It summarizes so quickly and smoothly that it gives the illusion of thought. But it is not thinking.

You need to understand that AI can’t have unique ideas. It cannot reason, create, or imagine without assistance from humans.

This key distinction will guide our discussion on how we use AI to educate our children.

Let’s start with….

✨What AI Can Do in Education

AI will make educating your children easier. But rest assured, it won’t replace you - far from it. You’ll be more important than ever for reasons I’ll discuss next week.

But AI will allow you to do things parents and teachers only dreamed of a mere 3 years ago!

For example….

My Girls Ages 8 & 11

AI does personalized pacing
AI tutors like Khan Academy, Math Academy, Synthesis Tutor, and Spelling Safari can adjust practice difficulty up or down quickly, ensuring kids spend their time working at their learning threshold - that “just right” spot. This technique has been shown to dramatically reduce the time it takes to learn. It also allows children to run ahead in subjects that they are gifted in and take more time when needed. This is a game-changer friends!

Quick aside: Programs that use AI tutors can be easily gamed. Kids learn the “cheat codes,” racing to the right answer without real understanding. My youngest was particularly adept at this. Alpha School knows this and uses multiple AI bots to solve this issue. We’ll discuss how YOU can use the same technique in the parent guide next week.

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AI can re-explain tricky concepts in different ways.
My oldest thinks differently from me. It’s beautiful, but makes it hard to teach her certain skills. AI can provide ideas on how to explain or demonstrate something from a different perspective. It can provide step-by-step breakdowns, analogies, or simplified summaries that can help a struggling learner finally “get it.” It’s particularly adept at giving suggestion in categories that MANY prior humans have tried to solve and it has the data from those studies and conversations.

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AI can generate practice material - so much material!
Learning is an iterative process. You must practice certain skills over and over until they become stored in long-term memory. But it can be exhausting generating these materials. Especially if you, like me, want them to be more than just dry worksheets. AI is excellent at making endless math problems, spelling lists, quiz questions. It’s like having a worksheet machine on demand., but you get to tell it to make it fun like word jumbles or color by math number games.

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AI can act as a study buddy on “easy tasks” and make them more fun
AI can quiz your child and come up with unique, more interesting ways to assess their learning and be built into a fun game atmosphere. Spelling safari mentioned above is quite good at this. Other options like Dreambox, Zearn, Math Academy or Synthesis Tutor act like individualized video games keyed into a child’s unique strengths, weaknesses, and interests.

If you are noticing that there are a TON of AI-bots in math but few in the other domains, you are correct. We’ll talk about why next week and how that impacts education as a whole.

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AI can brainstorm activities and ideas like none other!
This is my personal favorite. Need new science experiment ideas? Writing prompts? Historical debate topics? AI can spit out dozens - not all of them will be great but you’ll have lots to choose from. I like multi-disciplinary studies combining history and science and art together. AI is quite good at giving me suggestions for how to do that - it’s made a big difference because coming up with those on my own took a LOT of time.

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✨Everything above will make learning faster - but if you look carefully you’ll notice that very few of these things will help your child be educated.

Education isn’t simply the “knowing of things” - it’s the ability to reason, think, and create. AI won’t be able to help your child do these things - because AI can’t do these things without human assistance.

In the hunger for speed, don’t hand over all the important parts of education.

There are things AI should never be allowed to do for your child.

Next week we’ll cover those in👇

✨What AI Should Never Do in Education.

I’ll also give you a detailed parent guide on how to introduce AI to your children responsibly. AI is a powerful tool, but it can also be dangerous as we’ll discuss next week.

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~Dr. Claire Honeycutt